The National Post presents a week-long series about some of the most interesting ideas to emerge in the past year.

In April 2010 an article appeared in the scientific journal Zoologia complaining of anti-elitism in the DNA barcoding community.

A group of taxonomists — scientists devoted to the identification and classification of new species — directed their ire at projects like the Canadian-led International Barcode of Life, which aims to create a digital DNA identification system for all life on earth in the next 20 years.

Using their time-worn scholarly methods of studying form and structure, rather than genes, taxonomists had identified fewer than two million species since the 18th century — far too slow for those who feared that existing species were disappearing faster than new ones could be discovered.

DNA barcoding, its supporters said, was faster and cheaper than the old ways, a “democratic tool” that would make massive amounts of biological data available. Taxonomists protested that their slow and careful science was being degraded and feared they were being demoted to the role of “dusty elitists cocooned in crumbling museums.” But the argument was drowned out in September, when scientists from the University of Guelph lit up the CN Tower as the world’s largest DNA barcode.

It was a bad year to be a taxonomist, Harvard-educated politician, Don Cherry’s bike-riding “pinko,” or anything else that might mark a person as a member of the “elite.” Driven by post-recessionary anger and aided by the equalizing power of technology, the forces of anti-elitism reached new heights in 2010, storming the fortresses of academia as well as politics, business and the media.

From a populist politician claiming the mayor’s office in liberal Toronto, to climate change skeptics dealing setbacks to the scientific establishment, to programmers winning the right from the U.S. Library of Congress to hack Apple’s closed operating system, 2010 was a year of victories for the underdog.

“On the face of it, 2010 seems to have been a decentralizing year,” said Michael LaBossiere, a philosophy professor from Florida A&M University, who has written extensively on the ethics of Wikileaks and the Anonymous web attacks.

Arguably the most significant manifestation of the trend was the rise of the Tea Party in the United States. What started as a TV journalist’s rant about the U.S. government bailout of bad mortgages went viral on YouTube and helped inspire a loosely knit grassroots political movement that placed Tea Party-friendly Scott Brown in a senate seat in Massachusetts in January, and later dominated the U.S. mid-term elections.

The sentiment crept across the border to topple a wave of incumbents, from B.C.’s Gordon Campbell to New Brunswick’s Shawn Graham. Conversely, anti-elitism helped place fed-up-average-guy Rob Ford into the Toronto’s mayor’s office, over a former Liberal provincial cabinet minister who admitted he should have won.

Wikileaks and its release of thousands of secret diplomatic cables competed with the rise of the Tea Party to dominate the headlines. The web site’s army of hacker-supporters, calling themselves Anonymous, brought down the online portals of corporate giants MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and Amazon. Observing the digital battleground, The Economist magazine dubbed these the workings of “The 24-hour Athenian Democracy.”

The forces of political conservatism and anonymous hacking came together when someone broke into the servers of the Climatic Research Unit from the University of East Anglia, England, in late 2009 and revealed a series of damning e-mails that gave global warming skeptics a credible boost in their war on the scientific establishment for the year ahead.

Technology has helped give rise to groups, such as the Tea Party and Anonymous, that have no leaders and no loyalty to established institutions, while also helping to polarize opinions, said Michael Kazin, a history professor at Georgetown University who studies social movements.

While these movements can be defined using existing political concepts — the Tea Party is classic libertarian populism, while Wikileaks has its roots in the European anarchy — they differ from anti-elitist groups of the past in that they have allowed small factions to achieve a large-scale impact and influence, Kazin said.

There has been a fundamental cultural shift in anti-elitist sentiment, said Catherine Liu, director of the Humanities Center at the University of California, Irvine, whose book The American Idyll: Anti-Elitism as Cultural Critique is due out in the spring.

While classic anti-elitism was a revolt against an entrenched aristocracy, present-day anti-elitism is a revolt against the meritocracy, who achieved their status as the ruling class not by birthright, but through degrees from elite academic institutions, Ms. Liu said. Higher education, once envisioned as a democratic tool that would level the playing field for rich and poor, has instead worked to establish a new elite, one that feels more than ever that it is entitled to its power.

“The old aristocracy was always insecure about whether or not its power was legitimate or whether it had to protect itself,” she said. “The new meritocratic elite believe that it is better than other people, because it scored higher on tests.”

At the heart of the modern anti-elitist movement is anger at government institutions that seem unable to stop the economic collapse of the West and the rise of the East, particularly of China, Mr. Kazin said. Wikileaks and its hackers played into that fear by exposing the inability of Western governments to control state secrets, or even their own web servers.

But while the forces of anti-elitism seemed to coalesce in 2010, have they really worked to shift power away from established institutions?

Far from toppling the U.S. two-party system, the Tea Party movement was quickly swallowed up by the Republican Party. Populist movements of the past have also had a tendency to give rise to tyrants and so-called “billionaire populists,” Mr. Kazin said.

Meanwhile, Mr. LaBossiere argues Wikileaks was an “accidental decentralization” thanks to a single source of massive government documents, which will fade away when the fountain of pilfered state secrets runs dry.

As much as technology is levelling the playing field, he said it is also helping to shift power and money to new centres of control. Facebook is a private company that has had a profound cultural impact, while access to the web is controlled by commercial ISPs. Rising over it all is software pioneered and controlled by Google.

While technology has helped encourage and spread anti-elitist sentiment, it hasn’t succeeded in upending the old order, Prof. Liu said.

“It is interesting and it is enabled by the Internet,” she said. “But I’ll be damned if in the next 16 years, the president of the United States doesn’t come out of Harvard or Yale, but comes out of a hacker network. That to me is institutional change.”

However, anti-elitism will continue to be a major social and political force in the years ahead, Ms. Liu said, as long the economy continues to frighten the middle class and widen the gap between rich and poor.

“We’re returning to the income polarity levels of the gilded age, the age of the robber baron,” she said. “We have a very, very, very rich elite and a middle class that is declining. As long as that happens, we will see more and more of this kind of thing.”

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